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Insane Things Ted Cruz Says: The Left ‘Obsessed With Sex’

By Andrew Rosenthal May 20, 2015 11:49 amMay 20, 2015 11:49 am

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Senator Ted Cruz.Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

Is someone projecting? Just a little?

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a resident of the extreme right political fringe who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, told reporters in Texas on Tuesday that the left is obsessed with sex because he keeps getting questions about marriage laws and the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans.

“Is there something about the left — and I am going to put the media in this category — that is obsessed with sex?” Cruz said.

He went on to borrow a particularly mindless comment from his colleague, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who said in April that gay-rights advocates should get some “perspective” because gay people are executed in Iran. Mr. Cruz took it one completely illogical step farther.

“ISIS is executing homosexuals — you want to talk about gay rights?” he said. “This week was a very bad week for gay rights because the expansion of ISIS, the expansion of radical, theocratic, Islamic zealots that crucify Christians, that behead children and that murder homosexuals — that ought to be concerning you far more than asking six questions all on the same topic.”

Let’s just toss that remark in the dustbin of campaign foolishness, and focus on his first comment — that asking about laws that ban same-sex marriages, and laws that ensure that gay Americans do not suffer discrimination, represents an obsession with sex.

Perhaps Mr. Cruz doesn’t get this, but fighting for gay rights and marriage equality has nothing to do with sex. Would Mr. Cruz say the same thing about the constant discussion among Republicans about the “sanctity” of heterosexual marriage and relationships between men and women?

If anything, it is the right that is strangely devoted to the subject, trying to regulate the sex lives and reproductive decisions of women by trying outlaw certain kinds of contraception and all abortions, and denying prenatal care to working and poor women — as has happened in his own state with the government’s war on Planned Parenthood.